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At the end of this month the .nz domain name space will undergo a momentous, once only change. From 1pm, 30 September 2014 (NZDT) people will be able to register or reserve domain names in the second level directly before the .nz – e.g. anyname.nz

The Domain Name Commission is offering some Registrants the option to reserve the shorter version of their .nz domain name for up to two years. Reserving the shorter version of a name gives Registrants time to decide whether they want it or not, without anyone else being able to register it in that time.

A two-year time frame was deemed a sufficient enough amount of time for Registrants with the reserving option to consider the idea. It would also give, for example, businesses, clubs and other types of bodies time to change their signs, vehicles, etc. to incorporate their new domain name.

Those eligible to reserve can do so by going to the www.anyname.nz website with their Unique Domain Authentication Identifier (UDAI) from 1pm, 30 September 2014. Though it should be noted that anyone who chooses to reserve their .nz domain name directly at the second level will no longer have any rights to this name if they let their existing domain name lapse.

When Nominet opened up the second level of the .uk namespace, they gave priority to registrants in the .co.uk namespace over those in other second levels such as .org.uk, net.uk or .me.uk. The Domain Name commissioner for .nz has taken a different approach which doesn’t offer precedence for co.nz or precedence for earlier registration dates.

“For reasons of fairness, where there is more than one Registrant competing for a .nz domain name to be registered directly at the second level the Domain Name Commission does not believe preference could be given to the oldest registration.

Similarly, the Domain Name Commission does not believe one second level should have preference over any other. For example, the Registrant of anyname.co.nz should not be treated differently to the Registrant of anyname.school.nz.

IDN Blog has an interesting interview with John Kane of Afilias on International Domain Names (IDNs) which examines how well the Internet can currently support IDN solutions for IDN domains, IDN TLDs and IDN Emails around the world.

83% of the world’s population is estimated to be non-English speaking, yet for years they have been unable to communicate in their own languages via Web and e-mail addresses. Afilias is currently beta testing IDN E-mail a software package that is standards-based and allows people to use almost any language in their e-mail address.

With over 5 million .info domains registered .info is the 7th largest TLD in the world. Over 70% of .info domains resolve to real content and more than 1 million unique Web sites are based in the .info extension will millions more resolving to useful content.

.info domains now account for 40% of all domains registered in new TLDs. This chart from the report shows the relaltve size of new TLDs.

Our chart here compares the number of new gTLD pages indexed by Google which gives an indication of usage rather than just simple registration numbers of the first chart from the report.

“On Feb. 28, 2009, DNSSEC became operational on .gov after the program successfully completed all required DNSSEC testing,”

“The .gov DNSSEC public key was registered [Feb. 28] with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Interim Trust Anchor Repository (iTAR) and became available for use as the published trust anchor for .gov validation,”

“The .gov Top Level Domain is now considered an active DNSSEC signed zone.”

The next step in the government wide effort to better secure its DNS is for agencies to begin deploying DNSSEC within their second-level domains, such as gsa.gov, by the end of the year.

How big is the Internet? Is a question which is often asked. There isn’t a single answer but there are lots of measures which give a feel for the scale of things out there. Pingdom, have an interesting blog post which draws together quite a few statistics that measure the size of the Internet in differnet ways, Things like

The UAE is hoping to become the first country worldwide to offer complete internet domain names in a language other than English by late next year.

China have already achieved partial success however the .com or .info part of the domain must still be in English. ICANN’s ccTLDs (country code top level domains) initiative will allow for the first time the complete domain name to be in non-English letters.